For the ride and powerful voodoo

Audax Speed Analysis

I though I’d do some analysis of how I gain and lose time through an Audax event against the minimum speed (15kph) target.

After tinkering with spreadsheets for a while, I came up with the unit: minutes in hand per km travelled. So a value of 1 after 100km would mean I had 100 minutes in hand, so 1hr 40.

This is useful measure than simply time in hand, because, if I keep a consistent average speed, the line on a graph will be flat the further I go, whereas time in hand would keep increasing.

So here are the plots for all the audaxes I’ve done 300k or over:

I’m not sure what it means, other than how essential it is to build time in hand early on, when you’re quicker as you’re not going to be able to do much later. This is clearly something we suffered from on our failed Wales adventure. We actually lost time more slowly after 200k than the Skegness ride, but had somehow failed to build much of a buffer early on through the fairly benign terrain of Oxfordshire with a tailwind.